According the NPRpeople lined up as early as this past Sunday in order to get a coveted seat for the hearing on the President’s travel ban.
Photo from a 2017 demonstration: https://www.timesheadline.com/world/us-supreme-court-cancels-trumps-muslim-ban-hearing-8776.html
National Public Radio‘s Nina Totenberg has a lengthy, pretty straightforward, story. Here is a bit of it:
The Supreme Court’s Grand Finale: Trump’s Travel Ban
The Trump administration’s travel ban finally reaches the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday, posing enormous questions involving the structure of the American government and the values of the country.
At issue is the third version of the ban — which the president has complained is a “watered down” version. The court allowed it to go into effect while the case was litigated, but the lower courts have ruled all three versions either violate federal law or are unconstitutional.
Like the earlier two bans, version 3.0 bars almost all travelers from six mainly Muslim countries, and it adds a ban on travelers from North Korea and government officials from Venezuela.
The questions in the case are the stuff of history:
~Can the courts even review a presidential order on immigration that invokes national security?
~Did the president violate the immigration law’s command against discrimination based on nationality?
~And does the executive order violate the Constitution’s ban on religious discrimination?
The travel-ban argument will be the last of the term. And the importance of the argument is not lost on the court. For the first time since the same-sex-marriage arguments in 2015, the court is allowing same-day distribution of the session’s audio. Nonetheless, people started lining up at 7 a.m. Sunday in hopes of snagging a seat Wednesday.
The court itself will be under extreme pressure. There are only about two months left in the term and an unusually large number of cases yet to be decided.
One key question is this one:
Can the court consider Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric?
Why the Supreme Court will probably uphold the president’s travel ban.
A decision isn’t expected until June.
For more background visit my ‘Supreme Court’ category by clicking here. Don’t miss my post of two days ago, here.
This case filed in a California court (where else!) comes on the eve of the US Supreme Court hearing on the so-called Trump Muslim ban case scheduled to be heard this Wednesday.
See Reuters here for: Trump’s travel ban faces U.S. Supreme Court showdown.
Following is the news about the DHS/DOJ report that accompanied the ban and the case filed in California attempting to force the feds to withdraw the report. Continue reading “Muslim Advocates want DOJ and DHS to withdraw report on immigrant terrorism”→
I wish I could explain to you what all of this means for the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program which we reported got off to a flying start for FY18 with 98 arrivals since October 1, but I can’t. I’m not a lawyer and the whole thing just seems like a huge mess that should not distract you from doing what you must do locally and on the state level (see here).
The Supremes should never have wandered in to refugee law in the first place by literally writing, although temporarily, new law.
However, until I read this story at The Hill about the ban, I had forgotten that the 120-day refugee moratorium was still in place until October 24th!
You can thus see how meaningless that moratorium was since 98 arrived in ten days from October 1 and October 10 with the third largest number being the supposedly banned Somalis.
(In fact thousands of refugees were admitted during the ‘moratorium’ at the end of FY17 because of the Supreme Court mucking around in refugee law.)
The court has not yet ruled on whether to ultimately hear the other challenge to the ban, which was brought by the state of Hawaii. That case also challenges the part of Trump’s ban halting the U.S. refugee resettlement program for 120 days. That provision does not expire until Oct. 24.
Moral of the story: You are going to have to continue local and state political organizing and not rely on the courts, or the President, or the Washington swamp to bring a resolution to the issue.
See my whole category entitled‘Supreme Court’ if you want to learn more about what they did regarding refugees.
In Trump’s new mixed bag, most of the eight countries are not significantly represented in the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).
Editor: By the way, I assume you saw that the Supreme Court has cancelled arguments on the previous travel ban, here. I don’t know yet what that means for the refugee portion of the case.
Other than Somalia, Syria and Iran we don’t see many refugees from the other five countries. And, you should know, for Iran, that the vast majority of those we admit as refugees are Christians and other religious minorities.
As I remarked the other day, we do admit very large numbers of questionable refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Burma (Rohingya Muslims) and some additional African countries who will not be getting the extra scrutiny.
I checked Wrapsnet just now to see how many refugees we have admitted between FY07 and FY17 from the 8 ‘travel ban’ countries. But, don’t forget that many others from these countries get in to the US through other legal programs as well as illegally.
Refugees admitted FY07-FY17 (to date). Here is what I found:
Chad (182)
Iran (38,236 but only 405 of those are Muslims while over 20,000 are Christians)
Libya (12)
N. Korea (203)
Syria (21,110)
Yemen (146)
Somalia (67,158)
Venezuela (13)
The new vetting rules may have a large impact on Somalis entering the US….
Check out here where all those Somalis have been planted. Minnesota tops the list with 8,529. But that doesn’t tell the whole Minnesota story as Somalis resettled elsewhere move in large numbers as what the USRAP calls “secondary migrants” to MN.
Alaska welcomed 294, but Hawaii (the state that loves diversity) welcomed zero!
